Crystal Palace dinosaurs

If you haven’t got a plan for the weekend and London doesn’t sound so far, head to Crystal Palace Park in Bromley. If you can’t, keep reading. You might find this interesting.

FYI, you won’t find any palace. We felt very ignorant, when we were told by a random dog walker that the palace got burn years ago.

So, read about it first. The Crystal Palace was built in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition in 1851. After the exhibition, the building was rebuilt in an enlarged form in it’s current location. It stood there from 1854 until its destruction by fire in 1936. ( At least it gives name to a football team…)

But you can still pay a visit to some lovely dinosaurs. Far from the fancy exhibition (and the neverending queue) at the National History Museum, these dinosaur sculptures from 1854 will give you good idea of what science was like more than a century ago.

Crystal Palace Dinosaurs were designed and sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the scientific direction of Sir Richard Owen.

Funny enough, it was pre-dating the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin by six years, representing the latest scientific knowledge at the time.

It’s very interesting to see how science and knowledge in general was produced for and by the wealthy. However, some of them wanted to share it with the rest of civilians. Another good example would be the Kew Gardens.